Month: September 2014

Charles Dickens is well known for his close examination of working conditions in 19th-century London in his works of fiction. Forced at the age of 12 to work at a boot black factory and repay his father’s debts, Dickens in later life scrutinized and criticized the labor conditions, specifically child labor conditions, in notable works such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.

Charles Dickens

In 1842, Dickens embarked on a four-month excursion through America that included a visit to Massachusetts. The resulting work, American Notes, is infamous for its criticisms of America and Americans, but less noted is the fact that Dickens found America’s factories laudable in many respects, including the treatment of workers.

Dickens visited several factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he was given tours of the factories “in their ordinary working aspect, with no preparation of any kind, or departure from their ordinary everyday proceedings.”

Ladies of the Mills

Dickens described the women of the mills as “well dressed” and wearing “serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks and shawls.” The author also remarked that these women were “healthy in appearance” and that they “had the manners and deportment of young women, not of degrading brutes.”

Dickens was impressed not only by the appearance and comportment of these women, but also by their literacy. Many subscribed to the lending libraries often provided in the boarding houses, and some contributed to a periodical called The Lowell Offering. Dickens lauded this periodical as comparable “advantageously with a great many English Annuals” and bought a copy for himself, which he read all the way through. For the time period, this publication was a great feat for working-class women and was an achievement largely unimaginable for the workforce in Dickens’ native England.

Despite the fine dress and mannerisms, many of the women seen by Dickens came from humble backgrounds on Northern New England farms. According to Thomas Dublin’s analysis of the women in the Lowell Mills, 74 percent of the workforce in the Hamilton Manufacturing Company was female and 96 percent of those women were native born. The City of Lowell website states that the average age of a woman working in a mill was 24, with ages ranging from 10 to 30. In her account of working in the Lowell Mills, Harriet Robinson remembers country girls arriving at the corporations in covered wagons, often speaking in a “nasal Yankee twang” that was “almost unintelligible.” These country girls had little, if any, education, and no formal education was provided to them in Lowell. Instead, Robinson recounts, “the severe discipline and ridicule which met them was as good as a school education, and they were soon taught the ‘city way of speaking.’”

Not all women in the mills were of a rural descent or uneducated; some lived comfortable lifestyles but had been taught that “work is no disgrace.” According to Robinson, many came to Lowell for the social or literary advantages in Lowell, including the lending libraries and other luxuries.

Many of the women working in the factories lived in boarding houses on the factory property. These houses became centers of learning, culture and worship for their residents. Harriet Robinson recalls her stay in the boarding houses as “very agreeable” and described living with 50 to 60 women from all different backgrounds. In one article published in The Lowell Offering, the author recalled her 13-member “family” in the boarding house consisting of women who were “Calvinist Baptist, Unitarian, Congregational, Catholic, Episcopalian, and Mormonite, one each; Universalist and Methodist, two each; Christian Baptist, three.”

The residents were strongly encouraged to read, learn, and worship regularly, no matter what their denomination. Popular literary choices included novels, newspapers, bibles and periodicals, and many of these works were provided by a lending library for a small fee. These books would be the basis of learning for many of the women working in the mills.

Working Conditions

Upon touring three factories in Lowell in 1842, Dickens was fascinated by the order and comfort of the work stations. He described the factories as having “much fresh air, cleanliness and comfort as the nature of the occupation would possibly admit of.” Dickens also believed that the labor of these women was fitting of their delicate stature and that they enjoyed it, noting that their work was “cheerfully done and the occupation of tomorrow was cheerfully looked to.”

Dickens may have been too willing to believe in the workers taking so much pleasure in their labors. In 1845, 2,139 factory workers from across Massachusetts submitted a petition to the Massachusetts House of Labor for better working conditions. Of these, 1,159 were workers in the Lowell mills and a very large proportion of these were female. The main concerns of the workers were long hours, poor health as a result of unsatisfactory working conditions, and the brief time allowed for meals during the working day.

In the petition, Eliza R. Hemingway, a mill worker in two factories, complained that the “hours for labor [were] too many and the time for meals [were] too short”. The average working day for women in the Lowell mills was approximately 14 hours, with work starting at 5 a.m. and ending at 7 p.m. In summer, only 30 minutes wereallowed for breakfast and 45 minutes for dinner. In winter, The time allowed for dinner decreased to 30 minutes. During these breaks, women had to walk to their dormitories, eat, and walk back to their workstations.

Many women testified that long hours and unsanitary working conditions contributed to their poor health. Judith Paine worked for a year and a half in the Merrimack Cotton Mills before having to leave for seven years due to serious health concerns. After returning from her illness, she worked in the Boott Mills for seven more years, but was too sick to work for a full year of her employment there. She attributed her poor health to “long hours of labor, the shortness of time for meals, and the bad air of the mills.” Similarly, Sarah G. Bagley of New Hampshire testified that “the health of the operatives is not so good as the health of females who do house-work or millinery business,” suggesting that the health problems experienced by the Lowell mill workers were a direct result of the mills themselves. Sarah Bagley would later go on to form the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to improve the working conditions for women in the Lowell factories.

Data taken by the Massachusetts House of Labor reveals that the most significant illnesses suffered during this period were consumption, inflammation of the lungs, cholera infantum, scarlet fever, measles, dysentery, inflammation of the brain, and croup. It should be noted that of these seven ailments, three are infectious and can be spread amongst people in close proximity. Three mill workers testified to the House of Labor that the air in the mills was considered “not to be wholesome” and “bad on account of the small particles of cotton which fly about.” The mill workers were in this atmosphere for fourteen hours per day, six days per week while they worked at very hot, humid, crowded workstations that served as a breeding ground for infectious diseases.

A Good System?

While Dickens was only in Lowell for a day in 1842, he was impressed by the mills of Lowell and the women who worked in them. By all appearances, these mills were clean and ordered and the ladies who worked there were happy and literate. However, the poor working conditions and long hours suffered and articulated by the mill girls differ greatly from Dickens’ account.

The discrepancy could have been due to many factors, the first being that Charles Dickens was only present for a brief visit in 1842, while the Lowell Mill System existed was an important element in the New England industrial economy for much of the nineteenth century.

According to Professor Joel Brattin, a Dickens Scholar at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Dickens had a fondness for Massachusetts, despite his strong criticisms of America. In his American Notes, Dickens condemned Ameri
ca for its ongoing institution of slavery, tobacco spitting, and overwhelming greed. Despite his displeasure with many aspects of the American culture, Dickens had positive reviews of his visit to Boston and Lowell. While this fondness may not have directly swayed his review of the Lowell mill conditions, the fact remains that Dickens thought highly of Massachusetts.

In the final section of his review on the Lowell mills, Dickens states that he does not wish to compare the mills of Lowell to the mills of London due to “many of the circumstances whose strong influence [had] been at work for years in [England’s] manufacturing towns had not arisen [in Lowell].” Dickens erroneously believed that the manufacturing towns such as Lowell had no permanent residents, as many of the mill girls would come to Lowell to work and then return home for good after a few years. While this may have been true for some, others toiled away in the mills for many years to support their families.

As a resolute proponent for better labor conditions in England, Dickens might have found it difficult to compare and judge fairly the working conditions in both nations. Whatever the reason, Lowell turned out to be one of the few things about America that Dickens chose not criticize.

The girl before me has straight black hair, a bob cut with fringes. Her skin is olive and her lips are thin. She is wearing black sunglasses and is motionless. She is seven years old.

“Mero naam Reyhan,” she says.

I look down, and blink, “Your name is Reyhan?” It is a boy’s name.

“Yes,” she says. She stands a bit straighter, maintains a poker face.

I turn to the caregiver in the room to re-confirm; maybe I had misheard. Before I open my mouth, she says, “Yes, her name is Reyhan.” I turn back to the girl, and tell her that I am pleased to meet her. We sit in a circle. There are nine children in the center with my four friends and myself around them. We are volunteers from the local high school.

The caregiver tells us we are to first help the children with their homework before getting to the other activities. Some of the children are older and don’t need help with homework. The younger ones begin playing games without even opening their books.

I am soon sitting with another young girl, trying to figure out fifth-grade science. I notice Reyhan is the only one sitting alone. She is in the corner, silently doing her work. I ask her if she’s okay.

The caregiver tells me that Reyhan was named Riya by her parents. Pronounced “Ree-yah” but with a dozen different spellings, it is a very common name for Nepali girls.

Reyhan is an uncommon name for Nepali boys. And it is never used for a girl.

The next week, the children are eating in the dining room. One by one, the room empties as the children finish and go to the common room to start their homework. All my friends have gone upstairs and I find myself alone in the dining room with her. Reyhan has finished eating, yet she’s sitting at the table alone. I ask if she wants to come up with me and she answers yes.

“I just have to wash this first,” she says. She navigates her way out onto the back porch where there is a low sink, kid-sized. She is washing her hands when I tell her to join the other children. “I will do your dishes,” I say. “It’s not a big deal.” I reach to take the plate off the sink but she snatches it from me.

“I said I will do it,” she says. “What makes you think I can’t do this myself?”

I apologize. She’s quiet again.

“Please wait for me,” she says.

***

When we join the other children upstairs, Reyhan opens her book to begin her homework; she surprises me by calling my name. “I need help with this,” she says, pointing to a page in her science book.

“Is it question 3?” someone from behind asks. “I don’t understand it either, how are we to answer this?”

I take the social science book from Reyhan’s table and look at it.

Q3. What is the National flower for Nepal? What are its colors and what does it symbolize?

I look up at Reyhan who is running her fingers over the words as she waits for my response. My throat has a lump. I don’t know how to handle the situation.

“Well, our national flower is the…” I begin.

“The laliguras, I know that,” Reyhan interrupts, referring to the Nepali term for rhododendrons. “But what are the colors?”

I glance at my friends, who look as dumbfounded as I feel.

“I heard they are rato,” a little boy from the other end of the room answers.

“Yes, he’s right, they are red,” answers another girl. “I read it in a book”

I scramble for words I can’t find. The caregiver enters the room. “Red is the color of festivals,” she says, smiling pleasantly. “Now please stop getting distracted and finish your homework so you’ll have more time to play.” She turns to me and takes the book from my hands. “Do they really have that question in here?” she asks rhetorically. “What the hell were they thinking?”

That evening, after my friends and I say our goodbyes, we walk the fifteen minutes to the bus stop in silence.

***

I volunteer at the blind children’s rehabilitation center. The students there are independent with a passion for life. They teach me more than I teach them. Science and math and English can all be learned. I’ve read books with the same descriptions of the solar system in English and Nepali. And in braille. I’ve run my fingers over the same content in braille while these children sat doing their homework. Knowledge is available to anyone willing to learn.

I am lost as to how to describe this little girl. Once, when she was using her pointed stylus and slate to punch out letters in braille, I saw her prick her little fingers over and over, but she kept going. Persistence. When she fell in front of me, she refused to let me help her up. Independence.

Entering a room, she could recognize me by my voice, and even sense my silent presence there. I marveled at the resilience of her brain and spirit.

I could not begin to imagine what this child had endured. Reyhan was not born blind. In fact, she had become blind less than two years before.

One afternoon, after the children are done with their homework and after a long game of Telephone, Reyhan asks to touch my face.

As her steady hands cup my face, feeling my nose, my eyes, my forehead, and chin, she speaks: “I used to be able to see. Then I got cancer.” She smiles. “That’s why I wear these.” She gestures at the sunglasses she always wears.

“I’m forgetting what I look like,” she whispers, frustration in her voice. “How do I look?”

I tell her that she has straight black hair, fringes typical for a girl her age, and a little bob cut. That she has an olive hue to her complexion that gives her a nice glow, that she possesses a very nice smile, that she is a pretty young girl.

“I’m not a girl,” she said. A bit too loudly. “And I’m not pretty.”

Before I say anything, she gets up and storms off. I don’t see her for the rest of the afternoon. At home that night, I ask my father, an oncologist, what kind of cancer could turn a young child blind.

Retinoblastoma, he says, is a common cause of blindness in children under five, if not treated early. He explains it to me, but what I really want to know is how I had offended her, and I doubt my father’s copy of Bailey and Love’s Short Practice of Surgery has the answer to that.

***

The following days are routine; Reyhan never brings up the incident and neither do I. The months pass quickly and I am accepted into college. Soon it is time for us to say good-bye.

My friends and I decide that before we leave we will bring some toys and gifts for the children. They must have known we wo
uld do this, since later that evening, as we were walking out, they yelled, “Don’t forget us!”

It only struck me then, that these gifts—the hair clips, spinning tops, dolls, marbles—were to the children reminders of the many 16-year-old volunteers who come and go in their lives.

That afternoon, I buy a pack of hair clips for the seven girls in the group. One of them had said they liked the hairpin in my hair. I let them feel all of the clips and pick out the ones they want. Everyone but Reyhan has clips now and they begin braiding each other’s hair and giggling. I go to Reyhan.

“Would you like a clip?” I ask.

“No.”

“Are you sure?” I am tentative.

She shrugs and says okay and asks me to put one in her hair. Her fringes are growing and her hair has grown too. I put two into her hair.

“There, you look really nice now,” I smile, careful not to say something that might set her off.

“Really?”

“Yes, your hair looks really nice like this,” I say. “Maybe you should keep it long, Riya.” I slip. The second I say so, I know I’ve made a mistake. I watch her face contort as she gets up and runs out.

“DO NOT CALL ME THAT. I am NOT a girl, I don’t WANT to be one,” she yells. I don’t expect her to start crying.

I run after her. At her room there is no one. I knock on the bathroom door. No answer.

Outside, the balcony is deserted. I head downstairs, to the common room, when I hear sniffling. Sitting curled up in a ball on the staircase is Reyhan, tears streaming.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She looks at me.

“I’m sorry,” I repeat. “I didn’t mean to offend you.” I sit on the stairs beside her. She stops crying. “I have an older brother and a mother,” she begins. “I love them very much and they love me. I have a father and I love him too, but I don’t know if he loves me.”

“My father always wanted sons,” she says. “But after my brother … I was born. And it was okay … until I got cancer.”

She’s quiet again and I hear her heavy breathing. The tears come once more.

“It was the first surgery, then the other,” she says. “Then I became blind, and I couldn’t do anything. I became a burden.”

Burden.

I became a burden.

This from a seven-year-old child. It shouldn’t shock me but it does; I have grown up in a country where children with disabilities are considered lucky if they are sent off to boarding schools. This is not always because families reject them. Most often it is because parents can’t afford them.

We sit on the dingy staircase and I try to console her, though my words are meaningless. I know nothing of how she feels, I know nothing of what she’s gone through. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have something that you take for granted snatched away from you. She is distracted now, reminding me she still is a child. Her parents and brother are to pick her up for the holidays in a week. She can’t wait to see her brother.

“I want you to meet him one day,” she says. “He’s my most favorite person on the planet.” I tell her that I will, one day.

That evening while we’re leaving the house, she stops me.

“Akriti,” she says. “I want to ask you a question.”

I smile, “Yes?”

“Will you forget me?” she asks, looking up at me. “Promise me you won’t forget me?” She holds out her hand to touch mine.

Akriti Sharma is a senior at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, majoring in Economics. She grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, and has been volunteering many years. She loves books and dogs, and she greatly misses her two German Shepherds back home.

It’s 10 am, and I’m fairly sure that I’m getting strange looks. It turns out that sitting by yourself and alternating pensive looks with hysterical laughter leads to sidelong glances, even if you have a book in front of you.

The book in question is If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren’t There More Happy People? by John Lloyd John Mitchinson, published by McGraw Hill. And the contents are just as amusing as its title, if not more so.

It’s a collection of quotations on various topics by a wide variety of people, from such people as Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein, entertainment figures like Groucho Marx and Steve Martin, and even Al Capone and Miss Piggy.

Separated into sections by subjects (‘work’, ‘love’, ‘popes’, ‘potatoes’), quotes are placed in no particular ordering scheme, not alphabetically by subject, opening word, or author. Simply scanning the book leads one to believe that it’s not required, or even designed to be read in a linear fashion. For instance, I’ve been having great fun simply opening to a random page and reading whatever is there. Occasionally, this random ordering makes for a delightful incongruity: Samuel Goldwyn’s opinion that a hospital “is no place to be sick” is followed by Victor Hugo defining imagination as “intelligence with an erection.”

The book is like a party favor bag whose contents were provided by the most interesting people that you know. On one page you’ll see Joseph Heller on work: “While none of the work we do is very important, it is important that we do a great deal of it.” or Will Rogers on time: “Half our time is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” Turn a few dozen pages back and you’ll see H.L. Mencken on stupidity: “There is no idea so stupid that you can’t get some professor to believe it.”

It’s all quite a hodgepodge, and that’s what I find so charming about it. Collecting quotes is like meeting interesting people and only hearing the most amusing or insightful things that they have to say. It’s ambrosia for my brain. Before, I’ve only dabbled in quotations recreationally, but with the addition of this book, it’s developed into a full-blown habit. Someone call the paramedics, because this volume is getting mainlined.

The fact that there are contradictory quotes all over doesn’t bother me; two quotes on the same page might directly cancel each other out, and I still enjoy both of them. It’s probably because I just like having my think bone tickled, and this tome is quite the thwack. I’m laughing, thinking, and then laughing some more.

If any of this sounds appealing to you, the book comes highly recommended. Its segmented quality makes it easy to read it in bits and pieces, even if you won’t necessarily want to put it down right away.

Ignorance may not be the way to bliss, but if you’re looking to get some bliss in your life, the eponymously titled book is a great place to start.

Lewis Carroll’s six-year-old Alice, stranded in Wonderland, bleakly reminds us of the irretrievability of our childhood personas: “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then,” she explains to the Mock Turtle.

Alice’s theory holds true. Regressing to the persons we were yesterday, or, even more implausibly, to our six-year-old selves, would be not only nonsensical, but also counterproductive, since it would deprive us of our ability to couple our imaginations with the knowledge age provides. The aim, then, perhaps should be more modest–to preserve our interest in the world’s endless possibilities, so that, as the White Queen counseled Alice, we can “imagine six impossible things before breakfast.”

We have to grow up. Adulthood grimly beckons. But, in growing up, must we be distanced from the imaginative glory of childhood? As we grow older, we are preoccupied with escaping reality and assuming it tarnishes the imagination, and even though children and adults exist in the same world, the reality we experience as adults sharply contrasts with the one in which our childhood selves fashioned fictitious characters and improbable fairy tales. So what changes?

W.B. Yeats’ poem, The Stolen Child, laments the world of weary and saddening realism: “Come away, O human child!/To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” Pervading these lines is the notion that children must be removed from the world’s influence in order to achieve happiness. The child’s separation from society, however, does not require a physical displacement, but a mental one. Children, Yeats argues, are not called to be recluses; rather, they are challenged to transcend the mundane aspects of the world by exercising their imaginations. The realm of the imagination enlivens the child’s interests and restores a vision of the world’s virtues.

But these imaginative escapes forged during our fanciful childhood years seem to dwindle as adulthood approaches, severing us from the child’s natural proclivity to perceive wonder and excitement in the world. No longer able to evade the monotony of the world, we become captured fugitives, shackled to a dull version of reality. In his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” William Wordsworth mourns the adult’s inability to perceive wonder in the world: “But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.” Although adults maintain the ability to see the aspects of nature, such as a rainbow, that once sparked their childhood imaginations, these objects are now lackluster – their “glory” goes unseen. Something that occurs during human aging, therefore, divorces adults from a divine connection with nature.

I sometimes wonder if the taking of standardized tests, which all emerging scholars must endure, forces us to concretize our understandings. Tests prompt children to take out their No. 2 pencils and systematically select an answer demarcated by the choices A, B, or C. These tests have become mainstream, and few escape them, especially since new educational standards mandate that all students be held to the same standard. While the system is no doubt convenient and efficient, it essentially provides a black- and-white education. When there are only three possible choices, the individual can neither invent nor expand upon those choices, and some of their imaginative faculties are lost. When there is nothing to create or imagine, adults become complacent and lax, seduced into the lethargy of selecting from a prescribed list, and thinking it a real choice.

When this exposure to standardization is coupled with a heightened awareness of time passing, adults are even less likely to exercise their imaginations. And then there is the contemporary consumerist frenzy, which unapologetically narrows our desires to consumption and profitability and insists on the notion that time should be useful; hence, “time is money.” Under these pressures, there is, in a very real sense, no time for nonsense.

But nonsense (non-sense), as Lewis Carroll well knew, can be hugely important to creativity and the imagination. Perhaps we should all take the White Queen’s advice and start imagining the impossible.

I was born in Italy, and as an infant I was sent to Ghana, my parents’ homeland, where I was placed in the care of an aunt. My parents’ plan was to work in Italy and send money home to take care of us. Then eventually they could both return to Ghana and we could live together as a family.

That plan did not quite work out as intended. My father ended up immigrating to the United States, where he believed he could find a better job, and my mother stayed in Italy, while we kids stayed in Ghana. The entire family was torn apart among three continents–we kids in Africa, our mother in Europe, and our father in America. We lived like this for years without seeing our parents, and eventually my mother decided to return to Ghana to be with us. By the time I was 15, I had lived with my dad for only the first two years of my life and the few months he visited Ghana.

Two years ago I immigrated to the United States to join my father, who thought we kids would get a better education here. Like many immigrant parents, he wanted his children to have the opportunities he never had. My mother is planning to join us here eventually, and when she does we will be at last a complete family again.

This move to America was an abrupt change for me, and the world as I knew it was no more; the community, the culture, and the educational system were wholly different from what I was used to. Even the differences in climate were extreme. Going from the pleasurably warm weather in Ghana straight to the freezing cold winter of New England was a difficult adjustment.

The first few months proved challenging. I found many of the students disrespectful towards teachers and adults in general, which really disturbed me. Once, just a few yards from my school, a couple of students attacked a police officer and broke his leg. This kind of violence made me very fearful.

That was another thing, the fear I felt. I was so intimidated by everything around me that I could barely contribute in class. Furthermore, because I was from Africa, some students mocked me, saying mean things and claiming I ate lions for breakfast. I laughed with them to mask my true feelings, but it hurt.

At first I was able to at least looked forward to the weekend, when, as a Jehovah’s Witnesses, I could share the good news of God’s Kingdom with others. Little did I know that my evangelizing would result in more culture clashes. In Ghana, people are more accepting of this kind of volunteer preaching, but in America, well, not so much. Many people blatantly rejected our message, and slammed doors in our faces. Once, a few summers ago, when I was still a relatively recent immigrant, I joined a few members of my congregation to go to a town in Central Massachusetts to preach. At one home, I pressed the doorbell and heard the occupant yell that she would be with us shortly. When she came, however, she accused us both of having entered her house, and she called the police.

My heart raced when the police arrived and started yelling at us. An officer of the law had never before confronted me, and it was a frightening experience. We explained the situation to them, but one insisted that we be summoned to court. We were asked to leave the area, which we did without hesitation. It was a major relief for me when we found that we would not need to go to court.

These few years in America have been very challenging for me, but I continue to have a positive outlook because l know that no condition is permanent. My family and faith have been a support for me through my difficulties, and I strive to achieve academically because I know how hard my parents are working to give me this opportunity. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Being a teenager on the road to adulthood is in and of itself hard; being an immigrant teenager makes the journey even tougher.

During the spiral climbA small town begins to shrink.The summit makes it a modelCrafted well, with near perfect design.Sounds from below become faint,Gone when you feel the pressure change.The air is different up there;Breathing in won’t make you choke.Not a trace of pungent perfume,No flattened skunk on a highway,No need to worry aboutThe rancid fog of tractor-trailer tailpipes.Only newborn air, untouchedBy a rushing world below,Blowing through frosted patchesOf grass and earth. Breathe it in—Introduce your lungs to a delicacy.Extend your arm to catch the cloudsThat forever ride the wind.

Dylan Dodd studies English at Worcester State University. He loves nature, the arts, and the way life works. See more of his work here.

We Indians love our clichéd three-hour long movies featuring big Bollywood stars, catchy dance numbers, and memorable melodies, movies often set in exotic locations that are pretty but entirely irrelevant to the story, lots of romance and action, and–last but by means the least – a happy ending.

For the average Indian, Bollywood movies offer a perfect escape from the daily grind. How beloved are these movies, you ask? One of them, Diwali Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, has been running continuously in some Indian theaters since its release in 1995, and is still going strong. The title, by the way, translates in English to The Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride, which alone tells you all you need to know about the plot.

For the outsider, this is all very puzzling. Bollywood produces about 1,000 movies a year, which is twice as many as Hollywood, but the genre is still largely unknown by the average western movie-goer. So I’ve put together a few of the more common questions I’ve been asked by my American friends about Bollywood movies.

Why are Bollywood movies so lo-o-o-ng?

A test match in the beloved sport of cricket in India can last five days, and Indians will carefully follow every ball. An Indian wedding lasts three days. So a three-hour movie isn’t that big a deal for us.

Why are there so many songs?

Bollywood movies are indeed rich in musical numbers, and, while many present-day movies are slowly moving away from this trend, it was not very long ago that 10 musical numbers in a movie was the norm. The numerous songs are a part of the escapism theme that Bollywood has always openly embraced. We’re not talking realism here. Bollywood uses musical sequences as a tool to depict the characters’ emotions and as a backdrop for the action.

There are plenty of movies coming out of Hollywood. Why watch Bollywood movies?

Why order Chinese takeout? Why eat falafel? They both have something new and different to offer. The same with Bollywood; it has its own flavor, and, for someone who loves exploring, it can be a unique and precious treasure.

Why so many clichéd plots?

It’s true that Bollywood produces many commercial “masala” movies (masala is a seasoning made of many kinds of spices, and, likewise, these movies often blend many different popular genres—musical, comedy, action, etc.) These films are often melodramas topped with action heroes, damsels in distress, and one-dimensional villains, and are commonly served with a healthy serving of sweet happy endings. But there are many other forms of Indian movies. Art cinema and experimental cinema has been ever-present since the conception of Indian cinema. Today, we are seeing the return of social activism in films, a movement that was particularly strong in the 1950’s and 1960’s (known as Bollywood’s Golden Era), and young directors today are trying to capture what it means to grow up Indian in this ever-shrinking world. With changing times, Bollywood is also changing and reinventing itself.

Even just a few years removed, high school is a blur to me. But I do have some general memories: physics exams in uncomfortable chairs, crushes that went nowhere, never once buying school lunch and never once being ashamed of that, sweaty dodgeball gym-classes, and the most remarkable production of Les Misérables I have ever seen.

There is also the not-so-traditional memory of getting so excited by an odd piece of nineteenth-century short fiction that the rest of my life suddenly seemed to have new purpose.

My life might reasonably be broken up into two parts: B.B. and A.B., Before Bartleby, and After. “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” These final words of Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” which I first read for Mrs. Evers’ junior-Honors English class, altered the course of my life.

I couldn’t begin to explain why the quirky narrator and his cohort of workers captured my attention as they did. But something about the writing style—its poetry and fluidity—made the novella-length story a joy to read.

The English-majoring, poetry-writing bibliophile that I am now did not exist B.B. Before Bartleby, I wanted to go to engineering school, do math and chemistry, and build things for a living. That was not the path A.B. “Bartleby” suddenly added a jolt of passion to my life that high-school-me previously lacked. I immediately shared “Bartleby” with my book-loving mother. She read it. We talked about it, why we liked it, and what those haunting final words meant to us. That was the first time my mom and I ever had a true book-club moment.

When I was growing up, my mom taught me to work hard, embrace fun, and treat people with kindness first. She tried to teach me a love of reading, but that did not stick until Mrs. Evers’ class. “Bartleby” was the story that started it all, in that it allowed me to have more in common with my mother. Ah Bartleby! Thank you!

The summer before my senior year, I went to Barnes & Noble pick out a book for summer reading. The process was always stressful for me. Should I pick a short book and spend more time writing the essays or take on a larger tome and impress the teacher? Then I saw “Herman Melville” in white letters in the foreground of a cadet-blue cover. The dauntingly long Moby-Dick sat on the corner of a shelf. I thought of my mother and smiled. In a moment that freshman-year-in-high-school-me would have found batshit insane, I grabbed the book and, without opening it, went to the register, not giving my selection a second thought.

If A.B. got me to like reading, then it was A.M-D. got me to major in English in college. I loved this massive book. And, contrary to what my high school and college friends call Moby-Dick, it is much more than a “fish story.” Call me hooked!

I tried to get anyone and everyone I knew to read Melville with me. My mom turned out to be the biggest enthusiast. I created a series of discussion questions for us, as she read the work for the first time, I for the second. She and I talked all summer about Ishmael, Ahab, Queequeg, the crew of the Pequod, not to mention the elusive yet symbolic white whale. This shared summer journey stands as a precious memory, especially now, when college has made it more difficult to see my family regularly.

Today, several years past the foundational After Bartleby period, I have an extensive collection of Melville writings, containing more than fifty-five volumes. What makes my collection even more precious is the fact that the people I love are embracing Melville with me (or at least humoring me). My friend Kaitlyn, who is a talented artist, creates a Moby-Dick work for me for my birthday each year. Last year she made a white-paper cutout of a sperm whale, which hangs in my room. My friend Molly bought me a Moby-Dick poster she saw at an online store. I had it framed and hung on my bedroom wall. My friend Susan gave me a very old movie poster of Captain Ahab which shows the captain bleary-eyed, looking for revenge. My aunt found me a Moby-Dick t-shirt which I wear to my American literature classes. My whole family keeps an eye out for all things Melville. My grandfather sends me newspaper articles and e-mails me when Melville is an answer on Jeopardy!

And my mom’s influence did not stop at encouraging my passions; she actually helped me acquire many pieces of my collection, through dumpster diving. She and I used to travel to transfer stations nearby and pick through the used book recycling bins. We were not supposed to be there, but my mom also taught me to break the rules a lot, especially if no one will get hurt. The way I saw it, all these Melville books would have been lost had I not hopped into the dumpsters full of books. I guess I became a Moby-Dick rescuer.

My proudest achievement for the collection is that I recently placed first in a book-collecting contest. I can now say that my collection is award-winning, a phrase I always preface with a laugh and the phrase “I mean this in the least pompous way imaginable.” I do not plan to stop this madness anytime soon. The only way it will end is if I share a fate with Ahab or Bartleby.

After Bartleby, my life has changed for better and for worse. I don’t have my mother anymore. Over a year ago now, she passed away after a long battle with breast cancer. My memories of her, including the times we spent reading Melville, mean more to me every day.

Nick Porcella studies English at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and intends to teach high school. His passions include Herman Melville, rap music, photography, and writing. He is completing a memoir, Getting to Say Goodbye. See more of his work here.